SPEAKER_00: that is then determined by your deal flow do you actually have three other bets that are better or as good and that's really the i think the art of the discipline here is knowing when to use four bullets to hit the target versus you know just hey and i we have this happen all the time and

SPEAKER_01: the way i've now taught my team to do it because we now have 11 people on the investment team is i've taught these young folks to say okay uh in our accelerator we're investing at a 1.7 million dollar valuation right so in order to own seven percent of that of that ten million dollar company i've spent 700k okay would you rather make 525k bets six five 525k bets or own seven percent

SPEAKER_00: of this one at 10 million and compare it this is a very easy way to do it look at the accelerator class that just graduated with 12 startups is this where would this company rank in there in that group

SPEAKER_01: if it ranks number one where it's like by far number one it's better than all 12 okay you got a case to make if it ranks number five or six of those 12 well then why are we doing that this week

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SPEAKER_04: my name is alex and we have an investor panel for you today including our homegrown champion jason calacanis from both founder university and the launch accelerator and then we have ryan hoover best known for tweets cat pictures and the fact that he is a founder over at the weekend fund and then we have sophia amaruso from trust fund over in the uk sophia ryan jason how are we all doing uh i'm in park city

SPEAKER_07: and uh really excited to see you sophia and ryan it's been too long ryan such an amazing founder he did product hunt still i mean founders today ryan still my portfolio companies will you share us on

David Friedberg: products i mean the you built something that less that's got to feel pretty good huh it's it's been

SPEAKER_10: almost 12 years which is insane i'm starting to feel really old i don't know when i was when i was

SPEAKER_12: 25 you know talking to all these uh in my eyes 35 old men uh you know vcs i was like wow these guys are kind of old now i'm 38 i'm i'm one of those guys yeah yeah it happens quick uh yeah and the weekend

SPEAKER_04: fund is on its uh third fund ryan i believe yep that's right yeah and then sophia your uh your venture capital firm trust fund is still on its first fund according to filings that i could find

SPEAKER_23: that is correct yep and jason you're on launch four i think yeah i'm on a fourth fund and then

SPEAKER_01: arguably i'd say it's really our fifth because my angel list portfolio and my sequoia scouts portfolio

SPEAKER_07: kind of predate that and that was would have been like fund zero so probably fund four uh is the official fund name but it might be fun five and i've got to make a decision in the next year do i do fund five uh or do i retire or do i just work for my own balance sheet which is what happens to a lot of funds i think homebrew decided to go off their own balance sheet i think i don't know if we've seen

David Friedberg: this a couple of times but sometimes you get to the point where you're like the the process of raising

SPEAKER_01: money from lps takes so much time is so painful requires so much communication post that if you have the ability to just work from your own balance sheet you just eliminate i don't know what does it take you sophia in your first fund to raise money and communicate with your lps versus actually doing

SPEAKER_07: the job of finding and investing in companies in year one percentage yeah year one i was like yeah i

SPEAKER_26: would say 20 of the time was talking to you know founders and the rest of it was fundraising the

SPEAKER_28: fundraising didn't take too long i think i spent a lot more time with funds and funds and institutional investors who weren't right for the size fund that you know that i that i was building or for fund one so i could have done it more quickly if i just focused on individuals and people that i knew and the people who made up ultimately made up my lp base including you and people like mark and

SPEAKER_31: dreesen and hot shots david fax your your buddy um gotta collect them all gotta get all the besties

SPEAKER_30: from all of them it's happened a couple of times yeah we we have uh i don't know if there's a fund

SPEAKER_01: with all four but my friend friend sandeep madra who's now sold his company a grok all four of us were investors in his last company in the company before that but that's more of a poker table thing he always when he would raise money would just at the poker table say i have a two like last time was like i have a 250k allocation for besties you know first come first serve whatever and i was like yeah no that's great but you know i'm gonna provide a little more value so like a 750k but nobody needs to know whatever and he's like yep every single person said the same thing you're all just at 250.

SPEAKER_35: he invested in the fund he invested in trust fund because we i told him table yeah and you were like

SPEAKER_38: you're invest you're investing he was like okay 50k i was like yeah that was easy a little peer

SPEAKER_41: pressure i was like we gotta we get the ball rolling here for sophia honestly like i raised a

SPEAKER_43: lot of money at the poker table like not just your you know poker table but sitting around getting to know people people under you know you you talk to people you you know and then there's other people

SPEAKER_28: there who might vouch for you and be like oh yeah something about this person you know anthony noto

SPEAKER_45: from sofi i played you know poker with at the you know code conference and poker is just

SPEAKER_01: just you know telling you right it's the new golf you get to know people yeah you know it kind of works ryan you had an incredible advantage and that was by the way the last time i hosted my sky dayton myself and brooke hammerling would host a poker game at the code conference that was the last code conference the last time i hosted the poker game there because caris fisher kind of hated me

SPEAKER_07: i guess at the end and you know hated sacks and hated tech tech people entrepreneurs the whole thing so

SPEAKER_01: it was like it just became untenable because we would have some of the press there but the press hated the ceos and the vcs so every year for 15 years 20 years of doing it i just watched as like the animosity between the two groups grew to the point at which i was like why am i putting these two groups of people who hate each other in the same room and then i was like it i'm just

SPEAKER_52: taking the best one alex for myself i'm i'm taking him out of the journalism ghetto and i'm taking him

SPEAKER_53: for my side i was just thinking that if you really want to have people who don't get along the poker table is the best place to do it because it's the only place where it's socially acceptable to lie

SPEAKER_04: and steal from one another yeah within the rules of the game it's perfect ryan you had a big advantage

SPEAKER_00: with your first fund i think because you were had sold to angel list at that time or you were doing a syndicate or something maybe uh how's it going for you raising funds and that part of the business

SPEAKER_59: i'm curious yeah i mean well the first one it was uh right after shortly after product hunt sold to

SPEAKER_10: angel list i stayed on a ceo for four years afterwards but raised the first one and uh my goal was a million dollars i was like i'm gonna raise a million i'm gonna try to raise a million dollar fund um that grew to three million so like way oversubscribed massive funds three million and uh and yeah being in the flow and you know a lot of my like former investors who you know backed me and the team at product hunt were lps and still are um so yeah some advantages there for sure and then honestly it's we'll see how the market is uh we're not raising now but we will you know in the future and it's changed a lot um this last the current fund that we're in right now was was raising 21 and we all know you know 2021 was was a very uh bullish time uh and it was to be honest not that

SPEAKER_62: difficult to raise um relatively speaking to what i've heard from other gps especially like emerging managers right now so uh we'll see you stuck in the window because when silicon valley bank

SPEAKER_07: blew up and lena khan took the reins that was the end of the uh the end of the innocence like it was so enthusiastic and then there was just four years of complete depression which sophia you got to raise

SPEAKER_67: during yeah i mean i was raising at a time when you know it was 2023 when it's like a couple years old um and i think everybody was talking about the bloodbath of the of the managers who had raised

SPEAKER_28: during 2021 and that they've invested in these companies with these wild valuations and that you know i was in a period where there was a correction but also there was the what do you call it when um you know funds hadn't marked down their private you know they were over allocated on venture with you um you know it was it it was a weird time um where the market had dropped but you know funds hadn't marked down um their their portfolios so um but yeah i'm i'm glad i didn't raise in 2021 because i also know just speaking to uh fund managers who raised their first funds in 2021 they weren't getting the hard questions that i was getting um because it was it was much you know easier to raise and so i feel like it not being the easiest or raising in a different environment forced me to learn how to answer questions that from what i've been told some emerging managers didn't have to

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SPEAKER_07: to market putting your marks i guess is the term you were looking for sophia uh people these are all

SPEAKER_04: different terms for it i want to go back to micro funds though because this is interesting uh ryan you sent over some data from angel list that said essentially emerging managers smaller venture capital funds are having a much better time through q2 fundraising than they were q1 q4 of last year etc so it seems that there's been a bit of a resurgence in lp interest in smaller venture capital

SPEAKER_73: funds and i'm just curious ryan have you noticed that shift amongst your own lp base and uh is that going to change your fundraising schedule bringing it up perhaps i'll have a much better

SPEAKER_10: perspective when we start raising uh because that's when you actually really know are people actually going to invest they they often like reach out and say hey are you raising um we get those emails i'm sure sophia you get those emails all the time uh but you never know until they actually write the check um but yeah i'm in touch with avaloc and the angel list team and and they they reported between q1 and q2 this year 43 increase in lp capital um into the angel's platform which is sort of an index of a number of funds maybe scoot a little bit slightly towards like syndicates spds and uh smaller funds but that's a huge huge increase and you know part of it my theory is we're seeing a lot of optimism around ai of course we're seeing you know figma being like the the you know one ipo that's going out that hopefully will inspire more liquidity in our ecosystem um and so i think we may see a rebound who knows so i i'm not going to try and predict the macro and you know at the end of the day i'm just you know continue to invest all right i'll predict the macro um

SPEAKER_23: yeah you know there's like a greed fear index and we're now deep in the greed index um and i think we were from silicon valley bank blowing up trump presidency kamala presidency both of those i think were big unknown scaries for people like is it going to be a is it going to be like trump has gone wild is it going to be kamala's raising tax rate you know raising more taxes and you know could be

SPEAKER_01: actual chaos so uncertainty of the past two years combined with you know no optimism and no distributions i think led everybody to be uh at greed i would say yeah it's interesting it came up as a 69 there i

SPEAKER_23: was going to put it at 420. um but i think we're i didn't know you were pricing tesla robo taxi rides

SPEAKER_86: wait your birthday's 420 sophia yeah all my friends ditched school on my birthday i was so lonely

SPEAKER_88: it all makes sense now um so i think we're we're heading into a greed cycle uh where people are

SPEAKER_00: starting to have fomo and greed again i missed out on this round i don't own spacex i don't own stripe i don't own andro how do i get those oh my god humane robots is the next big thing but they have no revenue but they're doing an spv at what was that 30 or 40 billion they may have a customer bmw but bmw said they're not really using it in production but maybe they are using it in production

SPEAKER_01: like all that are the signals to me that greed is trumping fear and that's good until people lack discipline in their entry prices for you know people in our line of work seed and pre-seed which is where you get yourself in a ton of trouble so anyway good time to be playing the game and the distributions are going to make people frisky when that figma goes out with circle going out core weave going out i think we're just going to see tons of money start to recycle recirculate

SPEAKER_95: recycle all of those things it doesn't surprise me angelos is the tip of the spear yeah evaluations

SPEAKER_10: are also up they advocate sharing some numbers uh pre-seed is flat uh according to them seed is up 15 percent series a is up almost 10 percent series b's are up 40 now maybe that's a smaller sample um you know hard to try to measure the macro the full macro on that but valuations are high uh it's a lot different when i started weekend fund uh average entry price i think was like six and a half mil post uh is that a pre-seed or a seed number ryan uh that was over the entire fund uh so combination of seed and and pre-seed uh and that was like the median i believe uh so yeah much much lower than what we're

SPEAKER_28: seeing right now in the market that's absolutely what valuation and stage do you target like what's your you know i've heard funds that like we don't invest past 15 million post and it's like there's a lot that you're going to miss right but discipline's important as a fund manager it was so much more fun as an angel being able to invest at like any stage but um it's one thing that i know lps will evaluate our funds by is how much we stuck to the what it was that we said our fund construction was going to be when we talked to them you know the first time yeah i mean i

SPEAKER_10: constantly question myself on this uh we we do have some price uh awareness not maybe sensitivities maybe not the right word but awareness um we do pass on deals sometimes when the valuation seems extremely high and it's like pre-launch and there's not a lot of like objective proof points um but at the same time we're also hit to kind of play the the game play the ball what's the what's the metaphor play the field play the game on the field play the game on the field yeah and we obviously don't want to miss out on the best company so um we're re-evaluating a lot of that right now actually and thinking through even our our strategy in the next fund and how we deploy capital historically we've written about 300k average check size our goal is to have every company you know if it a unicorn or above like could return the fund um but the reality is the valuations are getting much higher also the optimistic approach is hey what is a billion dollars like that today's billion you know unicorn is is tomorrow's 10 billion you know decacorn um these companies are getting big very quick and if you look at just how i mean i hate to say ai but ai is also eating into more of the market it's going to eat into services in terms of like the gdp of of the world and so you can actually see some of these companies that used to be unicorns be much bigger today so that's an interesting point

SPEAKER_01: ryan because it's almost the snake's eating its tail if we succeed with these ai companies then we lower the revenue and and here we go that could be problematic it's i think about it in like how many bullets you have in the gun right and sometimes you're like well this is a really good target i'm willing to take three shots at it which is like triple the valuation and so i too when i organize our fund hey we're gonna have 300 names in this 45 million dollar fund our average ownership is going to be six percent at a six percent average ownership get diluted to three percent we need approximately a unicorn in the 1.5 billion space to return the fund every investment has to have the potential to be a unicorn or why are we making the investment which means it has to have a great team you know good product velocity and going after a big market um and so then you have to ask yourself is this worth you know if i'm paying instead of six million if that's your average valuation okay there's a 24

SPEAKER_00: million okay am i better off making this one bet or making four bets and that is then determined by your deal flow do you actually have three other bets that are better or as good and that's really the i think the art of the discipline here is knowing when to use four bullets to hit the target versus you know just hey and i we have this happen all the time and the way i've now taught my team to do it

SPEAKER_01: because we now have 11 people on the investment team is i've taught these young folks to say okay uh in our accelerator we're investing at a 1.7 million valuation right so in order to own seven percent of that of that 10 million company i've spent 700k okay would you rather make 525k bets six five 525k bets or own seven percent of this one at 10 million and compare it this is a very easy

SPEAKER_00: way to do it look at the accelerator class that just graduated with 12 startups

SPEAKER_01: is this where would this company rank in there in that group if it ranks number one where it's like by far number one it's better than all 12 okay you got a case to make if it ranks number five or six

SPEAKER_00: of those 12 well then why are we doing that instead of doing another accelerator class because we have so many people who want to come to accelerate now that is that assumes you have an accelerator people

SPEAKER_01: want to go to and that are high quality enough so this is the thinking on everybody's mind exactly

SPEAKER_111: what you're going through right and sophia you're going to have how many names in your fund where

SPEAKER_26: did you wind up at 22 i'm at 14. okay wow more concentrated than i anticipated but i've also

SPEAKER_28: done some follow-ons with some of the companies that i really really believe in and it's just much easier to like you know throw my weight around for the guys that are gonna like knock it out of the park then i think continuing investing in companies that are gonna still need a lot for me but you know i have less you know i have less data to operate on so i'm curious about you know i didn't everybody in these you know with these like micro funds is like no reserves no reserves but i'm also like you know just i think math assigned logic tells me to double down on a winner right like i think just

SPEAKER_115: everybody like believes in that you give an employee a promotion whatever that is you don't

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SPEAKER_04: criteria for making a follow-on investment what's the standout thing you're seeing in those companies that makes you want to deploy more capital into them is it revenue velocity product velocity revenue traction

SPEAKER_28: speed of development so you know two of the pre-seed come i've invested in two pre-seed companies of the 14 and both of those guys went on to raise really big um seed seed rounds and i think um when when it hasn't been very long since i've spoken to the founder but the product has moved so quickly that i need to touch base with them to ask how to describe it next time i talk to somebody or when i'm going on a podcast i think that's a really good um signal um and you know it's like nectar social for example like these it's two sisters they're x meta ones in x meta x product um folks and they live in seattle and it had been i don't know how long maybe six months from the time they raised with just a deck and you know msba the co-founder came over to my house and showed me this product and i was like holy shit like this is something i wish i had you know at nasty y'all this is something you know every brand needs and now it's like you know they're working with olipop and jones road beauty they just signed on goop like they've got like real revenue and the product is like i use the product for my social media it's like you know it's four brands but i use it for for certain like ai kind of automation stuff and you know i was my mind was just really blown and what i think founders are you know are able to do now with ai and you know punch above their weight being able to use these tools and have teeny tiny little teams is really encouraging so also the founders who are you know taking

SPEAKER_26: advantage of that and either scaling down or staying small um as they go from pre-seed to seed is

SPEAKER_04: something so we've talked about uh revenue growth uh and also how fast they're shipping and also these these team sizes i feel like we're really circling this that he describes as the new status symbols in silicon valley and if you're on the audio version it's uh it says that raising is now revenue press is now social reach credentials is now shipping and uh big teams are now small teams jason and i talked a lot about the static team size thing but ryan it sounds like sophia and you are in pretty close agreement about what's changed in the startup game yeah i mean it's uh you're seeing a lot more

SPEAKER_10: people showing off the revenue numbers on twitter and it's creating i mean i'm not gonna lie like sometimes some fomo i'm like oh like i didn't even see this company oh my gosh they're making like 50 million in revenue in the first 12 months like this is insane and so you're seeing a shift in how people are pumping their chest uh whether we like it or not like revenue is is the new status symbol uh beyond just raising now raising still matters like if you get you know brand name firm backing you that still matters but that's secondary to revenue at this point um and also it's a leading indicator into getting those funds obviously interested in what you're building um you also see a massive shift of course in the past decade from like press to to social and in many ways like twitter's become the new launchpad in in many cases um partially because the algorithm make changes um if you think about it like before if you were no-name founder you probably had most people don't have a large social following you put something on twitter you don't get a lot of play now you have an algorithm it heavily incentivizes videos for like demos and you know this is changing a lot of how founders are sort of playing the status game and and showing off what they're building and what they've achieved

SPEAKER_62: um and so it's very different than when i you know moved to san francisco in 2010 uh today

SPEAKER_130: signaling is like uh go ahead okay so for you no is it okay if i ask questions you are that makes it

SPEAKER_43: a dynamic discussion yeah no no that's when it's at its best you know i'm just okay i'm exhausted i don't even make that much content and i'm fried like you make a lot of content what are you talking about

SPEAKER_52: you are three four stories a day we just make different things i make four podcasts a week you

SPEAKER_45: make what three or four social clips a day i know i don't i mean stories are just so lazy but like

SPEAKER_28: you know sure startups have to like create content maybe maybe not but fund managers like some of these guys have like massive tick tock presences and you know they're just like i feel like the older i get the less capacity i have like in general to just do anything and i don't know if that's like brain fog or like hormones or laziness or perspective or you know work-life balance which i don't like that's

SPEAKER_01: not something i think a lot about but um that's a big statement from you because your advantage your unfair advantage is your massive social media following it and that's what draws in a lot of founders and that you're high profile um but you know i there's something very interesting in the signaling ryan that i think you pointed out which is the for you page means you could be a nobody and the algorithm will put you in front of the somebodies that's distinctly different than being like a reply guy and trying to like being keith roboi's replies you put out a great video you put

SPEAKER_00: your revenue numbers it trends keith roboi sees it sophia sees it you see it i see it alex sees it or people put out like the cluely video or the response video to it like all that stuff you just wind up seeing it so now you're aware of it and it's part of the overall trend i would say there's like two trends here going direct and then the for you page surfacing nobodies you know like outsiders being able to get in front of insiders those are actually two very uh interesting things we've surfaced here but it i like the idea that signaling is changing and that people are looking for you know if you have revenue and then the next thing will be profits so you will see i'm starting to see some we don't we don't care about profits we just i've had two founders this week when they sent their note say we have 24 margins right now two different ones one's a media business and the other one is like a sas business and they were like i'm like we're reporting on profits now i'm like how are we deploying the products we're paying taxes this year or are we investing in that you know in something because that's what we want to do but signaling is super critical um for founders to

SPEAKER_01: understand and for investors to understand because it kind of creates a shared dialogue what you were talking about before about like the product velocity sophia i like to come up with terms and the term we use internally so we actually have our own vernacular is product velocity when we see a founder with

SPEAKER_00: product velocity that means something and then we have a specific criteria for follow-on investments

SPEAKER_01: to alex's original really good question uh the other thing you didn't mention but by name but that you insinuated was hey they raised money and then i saw that that company uh nectar social had raised money from true ventures and google ventures our criteria is revenue growth lead investor joining the board

SPEAKER_00: and the track record of that lead investor and so if we're going to follow on if you have three four five x revenue growth we're following on like that's rare uh and if you have a lead investor who i know or we know who's notable who's invested in a great company before how did you convince them now out there's two possibilities either your company's great and they recognize that and decided to lead it and join the board so joining the board is a subset of that criteria because a drive by 250k check from a large fund not really good so in that case i'm guessing true ventures uh is either joining the fund or put in more than 250 500k every time you turn on the news it's about ai getting

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SPEAKER_28: the and is one of them joining the board yeah i think tony didn't frederick may have but like you know as a first time you know fund manager to be like that you know there was like some random texas firm had leaned it leaned in and wanted to preempt something i was like guys who are you talking they don't have relationships in the valley and i was like you guys should talk to like the big boys let me introduce you to frederick and tony and then i introduced them to one other top tier firm that's like a dream firm and you know both g all of them wanted to lead ngv and true are basically like okay we'll co-lead we're not going to get you know the 20 allocation that we want but we'll get each get 10 and it was like they just showed up and were like who are these freaks what is this this is so amazing that was it it was just like on the merit of what they had built um and it wasn't yeah their relationships or anything i certainly can't convince anybody to invest it's not like i don't have that kind of influence to be like oh you know but for me to be like i don't i don't know what i'm you know i haven't invested in that many pre-seed companies even as an angel but to

SPEAKER_111: be able to send it upstream and have like you know well the fact that people will know the massive advantage you do have and the value you're providing to those is you validated them with your time and

SPEAKER_00: skin in the game so therefore when tony looks at it he says well sophia's got 22 bullets in her fund i heard this week in startups she used one of her 22 bullets that actually skin in the game means something and and i think that's a massive advantage that pre-seed funds provide to seed funds or seed

SPEAKER_01: funds provide to series a and that's kind of what makes the ecosystem work the other notable thing i don't know if we have more data to bring this to reground this alex but the other thing uh you

SPEAKER_00: you mentioned the series b's were massively up this makes sense to me ryan because you have so many of these mega funds with billions of dollars and for them they have to put more money to work and you know that is going to lead to valuation increases so then that leads us to the discussion we had a company this week uh we invested in two years ago kind of maybe a call it a 15 million dollar valuation two three years later maybe three years later they're at a 500 million dollar valuation do we sell 20 of our ownership and send distributions since that investment is now theoretically 30x that would be 32x do we trim 10 20 percent uh or do we take our pro rata or do we do both syndicate our pro rata what do you think ryan how do you think about when you trim a position because distributions are rare and the opportunity to distribute is rare what's your current philosophy

SPEAKER_10: on it yeah we so we've done this once um we did this about 18 months ago uh we we invest in the seed round of deal in the first fund and that was a 10 mil post uh it's gone on you know i think it lasted on 12 billion dollar valuation and 18 months ago we're like well okay we have an opportunity to sell 14 of our our position to return the fund and that's a 400x return roughly yeah yeah it's like 10x fund returner on paper and you know we'll see it doesn't count until it's true dpi but we're like well let's let's get one dpi one x dpi isn't going to sink your dpi you'll be okay yeah yeah we'll see no it's i'm i'm bullish i'm bullish on the company i was bullish back then i'm bullish now and granted we we did sell um lower than the 12 billion dollar number back then because this is also when the market was also in the the slumps a little bit but the thought was okay one our lps they've been you know they're going to be so happy to see some liquidity no one's getting liquidity like 18 months ago uh two we're still going to have 84 83 of our position remaining so even if we make a mistake and it you know 10x is from here we're still good so we did make that decision and uh it was the right one um even though today it would sell for like more than 2x you know in the market from what we sold back then but um so anyway to answer your question jason i don't know it's so subjective um i think it's wise for early stage funds maybe after five six seven you know eight years in their positions to

SPEAKER_62: start thinking about liquidity and 20 30 off the table um even if they have high confidence that

SPEAKER_164: you know it's gonna go up from there my best advice recycling recycling teach me about recycling well

SPEAKER_01: anyway i actually have thoughts on that too um my best advice is if you have an opportunity since they're so rare take it sell 10 to 20 twice maybe three times and then by the end of the story you have 70 of what you could have had no lp is going to be upset about that and they're quite the opposite because if you gave them that money you know 18 months ago and then they put it into sophia's fund they're looking at it as you know okay there's a time value to money too and then what if that company implodes and that specific company had like a lawsuit and a couple of challenges if i remember

SPEAKER_00: correctly um with their competitors and so i had a comp i had a company that got to a billion dollar valuation we sold 18 million of our position we kept 80 percent that company's now worth three or 400

SPEAKER_166: million we look like and that was two years three years ago we sold it we looked like geniuses returned

SPEAKER_00: the fund our syndicate got a bunch of money and so and we did it with calm i personally did it with uber right when masayoshi san was offering to buy shares in the 30s now it seems crazy with uber at 90 that i sold in the 30s i feel great about that trade because i bought a house that doubled in value during that time so then the truth is with the time value of money maybe i left uh you know a third of 15 of my investment it just doesn't matter what does matter is downside protection so that's my sort of take on it and man i have uh two only like really two regrets i was offered to sell some robin hood at 30 a share and we wound up distributing and i think 14 a share when we distributed i told everybody hold your shares uh because it went public and we were pre-seed investors you know some people sold it

SPEAKER_01: some people held it that 14 now it's at a hundred dollars so that fun the difference would have been

SPEAKER_91: like a i don't know 10x fund versus a 3x fund if you held your shares or whatever 4x fund versus 10x

SPEAKER_01: i don't have the math in front of me but it's significant so i was like oh maybe i should have held my shares in robin hood and held on to the public shares and distribute them two years later which

SPEAKER_171: is what sequoia has been doing quite effectively yeah it's at 107 right now jason oh what am i doing

SPEAKER_80: this podcast i'm rich i buy i'm gonna go i'm gonna go mountain biking what am i doing here

SPEAKER_172: no it's like i woke up one day and like you know hundreds of thousands of dollars in robin hood

SPEAKER_111: shares that i got as my carry turned into millions of dollars in robin hood shares it's a great thing about being a vc if you love the company when it was private and it makes it to public why would you sell it when it's public like unless the founders aren't there or something dramatic happened i mean obviously you have to re-underwrite it every year or every six months but man let your winners ride

SPEAKER_175: uh and jason answering your question about uh q2 uh series b valuations i have that for you right

SPEAKER_04: here which is you can see they are going up much like every other round uh but the biggest gains that we're seeing are in the super late stage the d plus era of venture does that match jason

SPEAKER_111: what you expected to see yes uh there's so much late stage money available because companies aren't

SPEAKER_00: going public until until um lps and gps see companies going public earlier they're going to

SPEAKER_01: keep making these late stage investments out of their what would have been their public allocation

SPEAKER_178: they'll just be like okay i'll buy stripe spacex and drill here before they go public because you know those companies probably should have gone public already so on the point you made about

SPEAKER_180: profitability earlier jason is that is that what happens when we have smaller team sizes and just

SPEAKER_04: faster revenue growth because to me it sounds like startups are just getting more efficient overall i'm curious if it's more of a mindset shift or if it's more just this is what happens when you spend less money uh by hiring fewer people i mean we've seen this step function happen i think

SPEAKER_01: three times in my career like client server cloud computing slash mobile that time period and then now with ai so if you keep lowering the time it takes to get a product to market and the amount of money it used to be a year or two to get a product to market and five to ten million dollars then it became

SPEAKER_00: like a million dollars in six months and now it's six weeks in an accelerator and fifty thousand dollars to get a product to market i mean it's not even comparable um so many more startup bets to make that's why i'm trying to increase the surface area that's my bigger if i have any realization this year compared to last year is that surface area really matters because there's just so many more companies so you have to take many more meetings many place many more bets to your point ryan like how did i not know about that company that was sequoia's experience when tech stars y combinator and angel list came out they're like how do i not know about these companies and they're like i guess we can't know about them there's just too many companies now it's i think we're going to see i don't know what cambrian explosion means other than a big one so somebody educate me what is cambrian but whatever cambrian it sounds good sounds intelligent but i think it's like a 10x i think we'll be sitting here in two years and have 10 times as many startups hitting you know product

SPEAKER_04: market fit than we did five years ago the cambrian explosion jason was about uh 500 million years ago

SPEAKER_182: and it was a rapid diversification of types of life and the main hypothesis is that there's more oxygen

SPEAKER_00: and so more life got started yeah so that i knew that i was testing you alex i knew that came brain

SPEAKER_139: and i only knew half of that so now i know anyone and it's gonna get better and better can they build

SPEAKER_10: use software to build their solutions and so historically you'd have some accountant in the midwest maybe who really understands their space understands their customers understands their own problem they can at least build like an mvp and yeah maybe the vibe coded tools are not production ready uh you know call back to t perhaps uh i don't know if it was vibe coded or not but you know had some security issues but it's gonna get better and better and so i think the number not think it's pretty clear to me that the number of builders are going to increase um now whether those are

SPEAKER_62: all startups and like venture backable companies is another question but we're gonna see a lot more

SPEAKER_28: building and creating and shipping so speaking of this i just invested this is the first angel check i've written since i started the fund because i just have been really focused on the fund but the founder of lovable dm'd me like a week ago and was like hey we should do stuff together and we got on a call and they were like we want you to angel invest and it's like i think you know it's it's not going to be like a huge check but um you know they're the fastest fastest growing startup ever they just

SPEAKER_26: reached 100 million in arr eight months after launching the product they're at like a 1.8 billion

SPEAKER_191: dollar valuation from lovable yeah i had him on the podcast it's very impressive piece of software for

SPEAKER_43: this vibe code it really is and this is kind of exactly what we're talking about people are creating

SPEAKER_28: software in 48 hours and generating like tens of thousands of dollars worth of revenue on it and these are just you know these aren't even necessarily startup founders so i'm curious i mean i don't know how much time have you spent thinking about something like lovable and like as an angel that's like i think that's probably i don't know if it's the highest you know the it's not a late it's not late but it's probably maybe the most expensive um you know check i've ever

SPEAKER_195: written do you think i mean you're basically looking uh what's the sale price to sales ratio price being

SPEAKER_01: the the valuation of the company sales being the revenue of the company price the sales should really just be valuation to revenue would be a cleaner way to say it so people would understand it

SPEAKER_00: uh so is it a billion dollar company now or 10 10 billion dollar company 8 billion but in eight

SPEAKER_28: months they've reached 100 million in arr so it's 18 times sales the velocity is like so the question

SPEAKER_00: is will that sales continue and the thing i'm hearing against this sophia is people are sampling these products at an extraordinary rate i would say similar to when apps came out remember you buy a flashlight app for a dollar or you buy a game for 2.99 and like play it for five minutes and then never do it because you're like well it's only three bucks paying 20 bucks for lovable or any ai product you'd use it for a couple of hours and then you cancel it or you use it for three months you cancel it that's going to be the question is are is is uh that quality revenue or is it brittle revenue what's the revenue is it durable revenue yeah i think is the way i would say it versus

SPEAKER_01: brittle yeah and the way you can determine that is when you talk to the customers is this an essential part of their workflow uh is anybody here ripping out slack or notion or coda if you use those things

Chamath Palihapitiya: like i can't imagine ripping that out of my company or google docs ever have you seen craft oh use the

SPEAKER_38: glue is that glue or no no it's like notion but easier to look at oh really i don't know that one

SPEAKER_202: craft it's called i use notion coda but once you get the last lp update oh fantastic yeah it looks

SPEAKER_09: great it was very well designed so i guess ryan what are your thoughts on brittle versus resilient

SPEAKER_10: revenue uh i mean there well obviously it sure matters and retention matters and everything um but also there there's this interesting time where so uh vatican my partner on the fun and i have chatted a bit about this more recently and she wrote a blog post about this um maybe i'll share the show notes or something later but uh we're an interesting time where the foundational layer the foundational models that everyone is building upon are just getting better and better and so without you as a builder founder doing anything you're theoretically your product is just getting better and there are certain use cases where it hasn't reached that tipping point where the utility has met consumers needs but it will over time and you building on top of these foundational layers you you don't need to do the heavy work uh not that it's difficult to build everything around it but you know there's so much um opportunity coming and it's almost more about being in position and capturing users so that when the foundational models and ai is good enough to solve the problem that you're you're promising then you're there and so that's actually a shift it's very different than like cloud infrastructure and cloud infrastructure came around that like shifted you know cloud computing sass all that shifted dramatically but that was more binary it was like you put in the cloud or you didn't like maybe got a little faster maybe got a little bit cheaper but didn't foundationally change your underlying product and offering and so there's something that's a profound this is a profound insight ryan uh

SPEAKER_07: it's so good to talk to you haven't talked to you in a year but you always have these like really good

SPEAKER_00: insights so what you're saying is imagine if your aws account your s3 storage made your product better while you didn't ship any new product that's like a really interesting thing because there's you improving your product and then there's your underlying technology improving your product so you could argue like aws got cheaper where the storage got cheaper or maybe it got marginally faster

SPEAKER_111: but that's not the same as what element llm's advancing is doing um sophia are you going to

SPEAKER_45: make that outside of your front or inside of your fund outside of the fund i mean it's it's not in it's not with you know i'm investing at like sub 20 million you've got to talk to your lpac make sure

SPEAKER_145: i know as you as one of your lps i'm saying put it in the fund and make an exception and it's a

SPEAKER_45: learning experience i haven't done it yet but i think it's like i don't think it's i don't think it would be a challenge in 10x and i think if i was you know i do it do it in the fund you don't

SPEAKER_28: want to get relationships with founders even though i'm not like a lean check i've found it pretty easy to contact a founder when they like you know of course subsequent fundraising be like hey anybody want to buy you know can i sell some secondary shares so you know you know like as an lp i would

SPEAKER_01: say do it in the fund and say this is an experiment we have 22 bets we're making one of the bets we thought we'd try a later stage one and see what we learn there and um you know obviously we don't think this could be a 200x but we think it'd be a 10x and that could be accretive to the fund and you know it would be a single or double and it would be lower risk so we're gonna maybe experiment in this fund in the next fund and having a couple of those if it's a special circumstance where i have access i did that with cloud kitchens i have access to and i'm friends with travis i had the opportunity to invest in his fund and my third fund for cloud kitchens it was an extraordinarily high out of you

SPEAKER_00: know uh our normal investment zone but i put 10 of the funding because i was like i can bet on travis to 10x 10 of the fund and return the fund if he doubles it great if he triples it great it's all a creative and i have unique access so that's like the unique access carve out that as an lp in your

SPEAKER_43: fund i would be really upset if you didn't take it i mean it's a tiny check it's just the ownership

SPEAKER_217: like all of it don't worry about ownership just worry about what you think the return is yeah if

SPEAKER_111: you think it's low chance of not returning and it's high chance of returning low single digits

SPEAKER_215: it fills in the fund it may not be a fun i think it'll i'm i feel good about it i wouldn't be considering it as an angel check i didn't so in order to return the fund if you have 22 bets in the

SPEAKER_00: fund it has to be 20x so that's going to be hard to do but i mean 5x would be possible wix is worth

SPEAKER_26: like 20 or 30 million or something like that billion yeah billion yeah it's like feels like

SPEAKER_01: it's so funny you bring up that company because i was in a meeting with kelly who's running our syndicate and i was asking for an update and um she said yeah i'm building a new portal and i'm like oh okay that's interesting we hired a company to do that or we got a freelance developer she's like no no i'm building it i've been vibe coding and lovable wanted to show it to you it's a little early but here's what it is and i was like oh you could build a portal like angel list you know for our private syndicate with out being a coder okay interesting it feels like there's something big

SPEAKER_111: there sophia we had a hanging um a hanging question about recycling do you recycle 10 of your fund ryan

SPEAKER_10: what's in your docs what do you do uh we so both recycling and follow-on is is um it's flexible uh so we don't have anything that's like uh strict in our lpa or anything like that my position with follow-on and and that kind of flows into recycling a bit is um or it's related i should say is uh on the following one side it's like if we believe in this company like if all things being equal even if we're not an investor would we invest in this company at this valuation today knowing what we know now with regards to recycling we recycle within a certain time period generally so if we get returns sometimes companies shut down they return to capital we recycle that capital but if it's your six of a fund your five of funds we tend to distribute from there um i mean by then

SPEAKER_62: we're also on another fund entirely so uh that's that's how we've approached it yeah i've recycled i

SPEAKER_230: think 10 percent and i think in a couple of the funds that we've done you know it's you have to

SPEAKER_111: play the game on the field i think sophia since you were asking for advice and for me the game on the field is if there's no dpi and that provides the ig you know to your lps that's the more important thing than recycling if you're already returned the fund you're in the black and it's just a matter of how much you're going to return um yeah then it feels like maybe recycle it if you have the opportunity like if lovable is available and you had a million dollar return putting a million into lovable in a 10 million dollar fund uh and now it returns 5x and now it's you know you're at 15 million returns of funding it could be whatever really a creative you know jason for founders out

SPEAKER_22: there who are listening and may not be familiar with capital recycling can you just break that down

SPEAKER_01: for the folks out there super simple uh in fund documents uh when you get the first return returns back if you had a 10 million dollar fund you might say we're going to recycle the first 10 of funds that come back so if you have any early wins instead of distributing the million dollars which lps probably don't want a quick win of 10 of what they put in if somebody put in 100k getting a 10k check is nice but not life-changing hey maybe we take that million we know there's a winner in this portfolio it's you know that nectar company and hey let's put the million into nectar and we'll be alongside true ventures and we'll have even more ownership and what we believe is a you know really high conviction bet so it's just a way to goose the eventual returns of the fund yeah you know now if you didn't have any winners in the fund or breakouts yet and you couldn't identify them then you probably

SPEAKER_06: would want to just distribute those returns to your lps just because they probably don't want to take on

SPEAKER_233: extra risk at that point in time yeah they would probably want you to work towards

SPEAKER_00: doubling or tripling the money what as an lpn 21 funds right now i yeah it's too many i've been

SPEAKER_01: saying no to a lot of people um i i said to everybody like if you double my if you double the money i gave you uh you know and it's just basically like stock market returns i'm happy because i don't need access to this capital anyway it doesn't need to be liquid like it's like a wealth bomb for my daughters down the road um but if you quadruple it or 5x it then it's meaningful uh for me and i'm stoked and if i can get bill relationships or get intelligence from sophia you know she's got this great company uh nectar and what was it nectar social yeah like okay like if i ask sophia can i get an intro uh she'd be like sure you're an lp of course i'll give you an intro like and mark and recent specifically does this he was an lp on my first fund but we had a mini micro falling out because he wouldn't come on the pod then why why are you an lp and he's like well do i have to come on the pod to be an lp and i said you know now that i think of it yes and he's like okay and then it's

SPEAKER_239: like okay we haven't really spoken since i mean we have a couple little back and forth about why he

SPEAKER_04: blocked me okay uh well on that note um sophia i think it's very interesting that you brought up lovable because they are such an amazing breakout company from sweden if memory serves and you're based over in the uk so i'm curious are ai startups in the european area performing as poorly as some american vcs think because there's been quite a meme lately of you know america builds europe regulates europe's dead etc but lovable seems to break that mold so i'm curious is it right here alex you could just say jason so jason hates europe especially france no i just don't think i'm

SPEAKER_246: gonna find the next unicorn there in all likelihood that's all certainly not in france is that is that

SPEAKER_249: correct sophia or are we being a bit too um freedom fries over here i've been here four months right

SPEAKER_66: so i mean you're an expert you know definitely not an expert you know i think you know i've spent a

SPEAKER_43: bunch of time with like brent holberman and founders forum and went to the founders forum event a couple months ago and spoke at london tech week and whatever so i'm like just immersing myself in the ecosystem um but you know i think you know founders forum was really exciting there's some

SPEAKER_28: exciting companies the founder of lovable spoke founder of productivity spoke but um in terms of europe i feel like estonia and is is there's like a the concentration of startups in estonia and the um you know how it lends itself to being you know founder friendly or whatever i'm not i don't i

SPEAKER_67: read about it and i forgot the details but um it seems like estonia is kind of having a moment

SPEAKER_21: isn't that where skype was from originally am i crazy jason back me up here skype um no i think they

SPEAKER_23: were swedes um but they might have been from an eastern block country you might be right there were

SPEAKER_22: three founders so both right it was founded by sweden people from sweden and denmark but was primarily developed in estonia got it yeah so you know the nordics are special because those people

SPEAKER_01: have a design aesthetic that is really high um and it's really cold and there's nothing to do

SPEAKER_00: for six months of the year so they just work whereas in france italy spain it's lovely why would you spend 12 hours working on your startup 14 hours why would you give up a weekend if i lived in italy i would not be working on my podcast and i would be out and about i would be getting pasta branzino whatever and the lifestyle does drive i've seen this in every single local market if the lifestyle is amazing you got rich parents cost of living is low people are going to go out and just have fun and live their life if the nightlife sucks and there's nothing to do like san francisco like literally if you're in palo alto your last meal is 9 p.m unless you're going to like the 24-hour denny's like there's like two choices denny's and like an arby's by the airport like that's it you know even in and out burger closes like at midnight in the bay area so this is why i never actually

SPEAKER_53: believed the vcs who said that miami was the next big startup town i'm like it's way too much fun

SPEAKER_10: i think san francisco i'm way more social i have way more fun in san francisco than miami

SPEAKER_256: that's because you like to go to hackathons that's about you ryan yeah i was like surfing

SPEAKER_96: are you surfing in la what do you do i went surfing the first time this year in costa rica so you can

SPEAKER_262: get the bug if you got the bug you'd be out there surfing four days a week yeah that's when you know

SPEAKER_260: you're with your investment is when the founder is surfing four or five days a week la is amazing for

SPEAKER_264: a lifestyle sophia knows that it is i have zero company in the lma i mean i mean getting people

SPEAKER_52: to work hard yeah is my like i i've developed strategies around it but i have now realized

SPEAKER_00: like working hard and putting in 10 12 hour days and effort is for 10 of the population like having a career i think is for 20 of the population i think just everybody else's live to work to live now the

SPEAKER_267: the number of people and it's a generational thing and it's no judgment it's just the observation

SPEAKER_43: big time yeah i just um hosted trust funds first founder residency in majorca for a week and so

SPEAKER_28: invited all my portfolio companies out i was like i rented this this i mean very the management fees on a five million dollar fund aren't very high but i dropped like it was probably a twenty thousand dollar expense and i got this like seven room villa and was like if you want to come out here i've got this i'll feed you i ordered a chef one night we went out to different restaurants we went to the beach once we went on a boat which was like amazing did people co-work they co-worked yeah and i sat with them i'm like oh cool i get to be in spain be near the ocean these guys get to sit near a pool we just talk about like you know whatever latest thing they're paying attention to or reading and all educate each other i get to sit there and mentor them like on my time zone and everybody kind of gets what they want and like get to build relationships so i'm really excited to institutionalize that into the fund because it's like a soft genius you know it's no no it's genius

SPEAKER_38: it's just like no comp no talks no it's totally unstructured you know what i love about your idea is

SPEAKER_224: that's going to inform your follow-on investment it's also they're going to help each other so we

SPEAKER_01: call them jam sessions we do something similar but it's just a jam session or a pod so we have our companies get together and do a pod where they meet every month and we have 11 investment team members so they have about 30 potential founders in their pod they get five to ten to show up every month they share what they're working on what their challenge is on you go around the circle and they help each other and we're just facilitators and founders love meeting with other founders because i my thesis ryan is founders are mutants uh and like i get to be professor x you know like we're the school for

SPEAKER_00: mutants and they feel uncomfortable around humans but they feel very comfortable when they're with other mutants when you see those great scenes from the x-men movies when they're in the school together they're like joyful and fun and nobody's being judged because like i can make an ice cube you can

SPEAKER_277: light something on fire i could rock the walls yeah we all have something we can do that's an

SPEAKER_00: incredible skill but then you put them with humans and it's like they're misunderstood you know and

SPEAKER_10: they're just well they don't trust they don't trust i mean there's a lot of empathy and like trust that that's uh we used to actually do this at weekend fun we just opened it up to the portfolio saying hey we're gonna do a zoom hang there's gonna be max five seven of us and we're just gonna chat about like what we're working on what challenges you have and uh yeah there's more trust and of course you put that same person in front of like a vc uh especially or their team like they're gonna act different they

SPEAKER_62: they gotta they have to look confident they can't be honest uh it's a totally different it's an

SPEAKER_45: environmental thing is there a way that ongoing you guys do you have like a slack channel for your founders is there we have a sack instance yeah you do do they use it it's unbelievably popular we

SPEAKER_282: have 400 portfolio companies in the 12 years i've been doing this from a sequoia scout and angel list

SPEAKER_01: syndicate to now and um we even have the failed companies in there that are shut down and we let them stay there and we have an accounting tax channel uh growth channel and we have their uh channels and we have our entire investment team in each of the private channels for their companies

SPEAKER_111: and we'll talk to them there and they help each other it's not us leading it they lead it um yeah it's and then this book phase it's i think it's a great thing to do persistent great place to do it

SPEAKER_01: you have to also staff all these things so as a fund especially a small one you gotta pick like you can't start 20 programs you gotta pick the three most effective that you enjoy so what's great about

SPEAKER_111: the one you chose sophia is you like to be in a great airbnb in a city and try new food you're like me you're a foodie you like to travel ryan likes to be on his computer he wants product he's obsessed with being on his computer he's a surfer no he's certainly ryan he's first served but ryan really

SPEAKER_52: likes to be online he's addicted to being online in online communities he created one of the great

SPEAKER_111: online communities of all time private time that's you can always tell it's a great community if it still exists product that still exists so that means it's a great community that got proud of it so that works for you ryan you like to co-work sophia or i co-working for five hours on a zoom might be death like we might be like oh it's draining to be out of zoom yeah it's so draining you guys i have to go

SPEAKER_291: sorry yeah no that's why we take an hour all right what are the news stories let's do lightning round

SPEAKER_00: news stories this has been great guys it's just great to catch up with you too and share notes i

SPEAKER_294: was so intimidated i still get so intimidated about joining podcasts for whatever reason unless you

SPEAKER_28: know most people just want me to babble about my life and it's like really easy to talk about yourself but talking about smart people things i'm like am i smart i'm just always asking myself if

SPEAKER_296: i'm smart so full of it i know you're sick you're like i've only built a 350 million dollar company

SPEAKER_300: it was overvalued

SPEAKER_302: you've nailed it like self-deprecating oh and then imagine being inside my head it's

SPEAKER_32: fucked but you're just saying that's why i always send you i i always send sophia a thumbs up or a

SPEAKER_01: heart on her social just to let her know like you're doing good girl keep going you can do it

SPEAKER_111: uh all right you know i always like to give everybody the ability to plug a startup or two or an investment or two that they're super excited about what do you got sophia and maybe alex we

SPEAKER_66: could show it yeah whenever she pulls out somehow i you know when you were talking about portfolio companies working together one thing that's really cool is um one of my portfolios will nectar social

SPEAKER_28: is a customer of agree.com and agree are another one of the breakout companies that invested in pre-seed they're basically going to replace docu-sign and what they're creating is a signature to payments flow where when somebody signs an agreement and there's an invoice associated with it they pay before the flow is over so you don't necessarily have to send an invoice and so they have a lot of sas companies they work with beehive yeah i made a tick tock about them and i guess like they got like a four million customer with like four million dollars a year in revenue like who like found them on my tick tock which is like really cool um but yeah they've got like 40 000 customers um and they they came to me through i literally like look through the you know the pitches that come through the website most of them are like consumer just like off thesis and i like i looked at this and it was like agreed

SPEAKER_26: up comment i was like what's this so they just literally like cold pitched me they could have gotten to me like we we know mutual people but they cold pitched me and i was like this and um they just

SPEAKER_316: raised like a 10.2 million dollar seed round like a year after their pre-seed so yeah and sophia you

SPEAKER_318: also mentioned um baton yeah so baton market i invested at seed um they just raised uh their

SPEAKER_28: their series a from obvious ventures and so they are building the marketplace for smbs to find qualified buyers and for people who want to buy mostly like local kind of ugly businesses i guess is the the trend um you know profitable businesses someone who might be doing like a roll-up of like dry cleaners or you know yoga studios or coffee shops and so um baton market makes it really easy for people to acquire companies they're doing amazing jobs awesome now ryan you sent in three

SPEAKER_04: companies of yourself i believe one of them was deal which we've already talked about but you also mentioned atlas which is a very interesting company that i did not see coming yeah atlas is uh so

SPEAKER_96: i met in mohawk we invested in the c rounds has gone on to raise a series a and b and what they're

SPEAKER_10: building is a sort of a layer to apply for a visa particularly starting with with indian uh travelers us in the us we sort of have an advantage like we don't need to apply for visas um you know for a lot of different places to travel but for indian you know consumers they they need to apply for visas they have to go to these like janky government websites and wait a long time and they basically created this uh really clever wrapper not in the negative sense but a wrapper around this entire experience where you can actually apply and do everything within the mobile app and it also shows like you're tracking and everything and it's just a really interesting space it's a massive market uh that i think a lot of people are overlooking and my favorite part about atlas is mohawk in the very beginning he was just like effectively building apis on top of government websites web scraping was how they started so it's like all right these government websites don't have apis they're not like modern let me just like effectively build our own api and build on top of that and you know this is also a time like right before covet hit which is also an interesting time to be building a business like this so anyway i love the ceo mohawk and what he's building there and and uh just creating like more flexibility and uh convenience with traveling is just i think a net

SPEAKER_324: positive for the world too okay jason what do you got uh so we just wrapped up launch accelerator 34

SPEAKER_01: and uh two companies that really got a lot of attention one was autolane which is by a serial founder um he previously had a company called um neighborly which you which rented um storefronts and neighborly was this great idea that died during covid victim of the covid wars but you would take a storefront and people could go there and rent it by the hour for a book club for a rehearsal dinner for an off-site and people loved it and there was all this extra you know if you live in la and you've been to like i don't know west hollywood there's all this storefronts or montana or you know there's all these storefronts everywhere and so imagine taking one of them and

SPEAKER_00: making it an airbnb essentially anyway that failed he came to me with this new idea autolane

SPEAKER_01: he said you know self-driving's here and i said yeah i'm aware uh i got a couple investments in that space and he said you people are going to be doing self-driving deliveries and pickups i said say more he said

SPEAKER_00: imagine your walmart heb is the big chain of like uh grocery stores in texas where i live and you have a tesla coming to pick stuff up a doordash car an uber i'm like well they have all those coming he's like yeah it's chaos already now imagine you add 10 different fleets of automated cars so they're building the operating system to manage that so they sell into a walmart or to these other places you

SPEAKER_01: can pull up the website and um that gives them software to know hey these are the parking starts parking spots for the automated vehicles and ryan owns a tesla model y ryan you might send your car to the central market and or this whole foods that's a distinct possibility so instead of ordering from instacart imagine ryan you ordered from whole foods and then whole foods brought it out to the curb and put it in the back of your car automatically without me doing it being there without you doing it but it's your car yeah right or so now sophia imagine like oh you get dropped off at work and then it goes and picks up your erwan lunch and your team lunch and then brings it back to your office and parks in your parking spot how does that whole handoff at erwan work then imagine i'm at erwan or i don't know um pick a company domino's pizza decides they want to own the fleet so domino's pizza says okay we're going to have five model y's or waymo is selling their technology to toyota now and volkswagen has their own thing so they buy five volkswagons and they decide they're going to send these volkswagen ids out to deliver pizza well they still need an operating system to manage all

SPEAKER_00: that so anyway he's building that operating system and all the handoff and he's super early but what was amazing is this founder is a fundraising machine and that's a new criteria for me we have 13 criterias for investing product velocity is one of them world-class design serial founder and alumni of our programs this person has all of those but he's also a fundraising machine so i added that as one of our 14th fundraising uh machine as a tag for like a founder we love because some fact we have some founders who are great at product velocity and great ideas and great at recruiting but for some reason they can't raise money infuriating and frustrating because it's like they have all the other qualities so anyway i love that one and then another one that's really interesting this team i think came out of google or uber i can't remember um and it's called doctors and you may have heard people are doing self-directed health care and where you're seeing self-directed health care most of all is in travel uh um elective surgeries i don't know what they call those but elective surgeries uh and traveling to places where you have the highest rated providers um and the lowest medical tourism medical tourism thank you so medical tourism is part of a subset of a bigger theme of self-directed health care which i think like few um super power whoop or uh eat sleep that's all like self-directed

SPEAKER_01: health care this is different this is like elective so people are going for dentistry to mexico stem cells to you know panama um all types of augmentations and facelifts in south korea so they started with hair transplants in turkey and then their their secret that they figured out that nobody else did is this is all happening on tick tock and there was this like fear that people had is this safe should i do this and then there's the people who are you know have these centers in turkey and they're trying to convince people it's safe and it turns out tick tocks help people bridge that gap and so that's their first one and then the next one i didn't know was in spain portugal france um freezing your eggs and doing ivf is like five thousand dollars in the united states it's thirty

SPEAKER_52: thousand dollars so now people are going to two harvest cycles for 60 days and it's like so i asked him

SPEAKER_334: like when people do that are they doing it because it's that much cheaper or are they doing it because they want to have a two-month vacation in spain or portugal or france and you know they said to me yes

SPEAKER_01: it's both you can spend five thousand dollars get an airbnb for five thousand dollars have an incredible

SPEAKER_00: relaxing 60 days in france harvest your stuff and but you need to have some marketplace between them and so they're the marketplace between them so there's two uh that just graduated last week or this week

SPEAKER_111: actually from the launch accelerator if you want to come to the launch accelerator launch.co apply we've done 34 cohorts um it's been really fun all right well friends that brings us to a wrap for today

SPEAKER_04: and sophia thank you so much for coming on where can people find trust fund and where can people find you

SPEAKER_28: on the great white internet trustfund.vc and then i'm sophia amaruso pretty much everywhere pretty much

SPEAKER_253: everywhere instagram is you're big on instagram tick tock yeah i don't spend as much time i don't always

SPEAKER_28: cross post but yeah i'm just focused on instagram i'm an elder millennial yeah elder millennial

SPEAKER_178: instagram right yeah i'm a gen x so i'm on x.com slash twitter yeah uh where are you millennial ryan

SPEAKER_10: millennial ryan i i'm on twitter that's where i spend most of the time uh r hoover and uh yeah i'm not on tick i mean there is a tick tock you'll find it if you search but i'm not gonna

SPEAKER_22: i'm not gonna say it's good content uh and the website is weekend.fund i believe that's right

SPEAKER_111: yeah and launch.co there you go with no m i'm still trying to get the launch.com but i'm fine with the launch.co founder.university uh which is our pre-accelerator where we teach people how to start really talk about it too much probably but founder university's second city in the world will be after the united states is going to be in saudi and then i'll probably bring it to two other

SPEAKER_178: countries in 2026 or announced two countries in 2026. uh and i'm at jason on instagram and at jason on

SPEAKER_04: the twitter x all right well we're back on friday thank you all very much we'll see you then this has been a twist you